


I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)

by bittergreens



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s03e03 His Last Vow, Johnlock Trope Challenge, Love Confessions, M/M, Missing Scene, POV Sherlock Holmes, Pining, Romance, Season/Series 03, Slash, Unconscious Love Confession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-03
Updated: 2014-06-03
Packaged: 2018-02-03 07:28:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1736228
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bittergreens/pseuds/bittergreens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"i carry your heart with me(i carry it in<br/>
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere<br/>
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done<br/>
by only me is your doing,my darling)<br/>
i fear"<br/>
-e.e. cummings</p>
            </blockquote>





	I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)

**Author's Note:**

> I’m sure everyone’s sick of season three angst by now, but this just sort of happened last night when I was trying to sleep.
> 
> I wrote this for the Johnlock Trope Challenge on tumblr, for the first prompt: Unconscious Love Confession. 
> 
> The title is lovingly stolen from an e.e. cummings poem: "i carry your heart with me(i carry it in"
> 
> Also, I never write short things! This is an experiment.
> 
> Special thanks to [Natka](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Natka) for bringing this trope challenge to my attention. I never would have written this without you!

Sherlock dreams.

This surprises him. He knows it's rare to dream during such heavily sedated sleep, his body thrumming with drugs, with fluids, with the IV that is keeping his heart running.

He dreams of the safe house where he stayed outside St. Petersburg, except it's all wrong. Instead of a dilapidated house at the end of a row of dingy flats, it's a cottage on a beach. The walls are white washed stone, the roof—grey slate. All around it is a sea of waving grass, as high as Sherlock's waist, higher in some places where the dunes swell upwards.

It looks like the place Sherlock used to spend his summers as a boy, climbing over rocks, picking stones and shells out of crevices in the cliffs, happy sun burnt hours far from Mummy and Daddy and Mycroft and all the cares of Sherlock’s troubled youth.

Sherlock pulls a face. He’d rather dream of Baker Street—of John.

He is standing in the doorway of the cottage. He is wounded—there is a bandage wrapped around his chest. He feels weak, has to lean one arm on the doorframe to support himself but he can't stop looking out across the field. He is waiting for someone. He can feel the anxiety of the waiting wearing on him, like the relentless rub of a shoe against a new blister.

The sun is setting over the grass- making the gold catch the light- sending gold ripples over the waves with each gust of wind. It’s beautiful in a violent sort of way—the sun being sent to its death in the sea.

It’s then that Sherlock realizes who he's waiting for—why the anxiety in his chest is burning like a hole beside his heart. He's waiting for John and just as he thinks this, just as he realizes in the same breath that John will never come—has never come here, all that is past now—he sees John coming around the bend in the path, walking slowly, leaning hard on his cane.

He looks up, sees Sherlock, offers a small grin, but he looks tired, older than Sherlock has ever seen him, and suddenly the ache in Sherlock's chest is much worse as he realizes he did that, he brought John's limp back—he is responsible for John's pain.

Sherlock walks out to him, even though it hurts to leave the cool darkness of the house, it hurts to see the sun bright on John's face, the wrinkles in the corners of his eyes as he looks up at Sherlock, the grooves of pain around his mouth deepening.

John won't cross the threshold. Somehow Sherlock knows this without knowing how he knows. If it didn't hurt so much to do so, he would shrug. Such is the logic of dreams.

He supposes this is why he also knows the cottage behind him is a safe house, although he's never seen the building before in his life.

"This was supposed to be for us."

John has stopped his approach. He’s standing right in front of Sherlock.

Sherlock is silent, watches John squinting into the sunlight, his small mouth as he goes on speaking.

"If you had trusted me, this is where we would have stayed until it all blew over. Until we tracked him down together, you and me, Sherlock. The way it should have been—the way it’s meant to be, yeah? You and me.”

Sherlock watches the emotions on John’s face shift, rippling like the wind through the grass, changing so fast he doesn’t have time to discern one from the other.

"I knew you'd come back," John says, and Sherlock holds himself utterly still to listen. There is pain somewhere deep within him but he ignores it because it’s only physical pain and this is a dream. "If you can come back from the dead once then you can come back again. Isn't that what they say?"

Something is wrong with John's voice—it sounds too tight, thin. 

"No, no of course it isn't. God. How could you, Sherlock? How could you attempt to leave me again? After everything I went through the first time, after everything—"

Sherlock recognizes the smile on John’s face. It’s the one he uses on criminals. It is glittering and sharp, like the blade of a knife. 

"You left me once and I survived it, didn't I?" The smile grows sharper, seems to glitter more brightly, and Sherlock is afraid. "Mmm? Didn't I?"

John draws another angry step nearer and Sherlock is frozen in place, his ribs aching, but this time not with physical pain. 

"So in theory I could survive it again. Except I couldn't Sherlock, I couldn't because—goddammit!” John’s face crumples. He is struggling for breath. “Why do you do this to me? _Every time_. Why do we have to do it like this? In subway cars rigged with bombs, on the tops of buildings, by your _fucking_ grave, why can't— _for once_ —why can't we—”

Sherlock watches John's hand make a fist, swing through the air at nothing, and then clench hard on the handle of his cane. He drops his head. This gesture is worse than any of the others.

"Why can't we _ever_ do this when one of us isn't on the edge of death? Just once would be nice."

Suddenly he looks so old again. His face is drawn—that same, tight smile pulling at his mouth. He sighs, draws a deep breath, blinks the sun out of his eyes.

"But you've left me with no choice again, haven't you?"

Sherlock watches the tense line of John's mouth grow darker as the sun begins to dip behind the grass. The gentle swell of the horizon—so soft a moment ago, all blurred with gold—has gone jagged as the shadows creep in. Each blade of grass is like a spike. They hurt Sherlock's eyes.

"Jesus, Sherlock.” John’s voice makes Sherlock’s chest ache, and suddenly he knows why—he and John, they are the same, they share the same heart. No wonder John is in pain. “I promised myself so many times—never again.” John is shaking his head. “Don't let the chance slip by. Well, fine here it is.” He lifts his chin, and again, Sherlock recognizes the expression on his face. It’s the one when he is being brave, when he is terrified. “You mean the world to me. You always have. And if you hadn't gone and killed yourself like the fucking prat that you are I never would have moved on, alright? I never would have found Mary because I would still have you.”

John leans closer, but he’s still miles away—the shadows that separate him from Sherlock lengthening by the second. "If I had the chance to do it all again, to go back and drag you off that bloody rooftop, I would. I'd do it in a heartbeat. And if it meant never meeting Mary... I wouldn't look back.” The incision of John’s whisper is as fine as a scalpel, slicing its way into Sherlock’s heart. “I'd have no regrets."

Sherlock sees that the sun is completely gone now—it has vanished into the glittering dark of the ocean and Sherlock is glad because the darkness means he can no longer see the pain on John's face, the way his broken hand clutches the handle of his horrible cane.

"There." John's voice is miserable, tight. "There I've said it.”

Sherlock doesn’t say anything. He cannot speak. He is mute—frozen where he stands in the shadows of the high grass, the shape of the cottage behind him now crouching like some awful, slumbering beast. 

All the gold is gone from the world.

John steps forward in the darkness, takes Sherlock’s hand.

Sherlock feels John's fingers brush his own and realizes in the same instant that he isn't dreaming—the emotion in John's voice, the touch of his hand, is real. 

The cottage, the grass, the ocean are gone, but John’s fingers remain, warm against his.

He is in a dark hospital room in central London. He has been shot by John’s wife.

Sherlock keeps his eyes shut, doesn't dare shatter the effect of his deathly stillness.

He feels John’s fingers skim over his wrist and then all at once clench down.

John makes a solitary muffled choking sound, and it is the worst sound Sherlock’s ever heard. It is the sound of pain pushed down and pushed down until it fills the lungs of the person who's gone on ignoring it, drowning them.

The fingers clench harder. Sherlock feels the heat of John’s forehead pressing into his arm, blazing like a fever, the broken rhythm of his breath equally hot on Sherlock’s skin. His hands are squeezing Sherlock's arm. It hurts. Sherlock doesn't move.

The ringtone on John’s phone shatters the silence—stark and familiar all at once. He’s never changed it in all the years Sherlock’s been away.

The grip on Sherlock’s arm vanishes. 

John draws a ragged breath and then he’s speaking into his phone, his voice low and rough with emotion—trying to hide it.

“Yeah, I’m here.” Sherlock can picture the sharp jerk of John’s chin as he nods. He doesn’t need to see it. “Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be right down.”

Sherlock hears the sound of footsteps leaving his bed, the sound of the door opening and closing, and then there is silence, broken only by the idle beep of the heart monitor—the distant sound of the ocean, the sunlight burning through the grass, the shadow of the cottage that never existed at his back, once again hundreds of miles away.

**Author's Note:**

> Come follow me on [tumblr](http://holmesianpose.tumblr.com/)!
> 
> Comments are love. <3 <3

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] I carry your heart with me (I carry it in my heart)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3601119) by [aranel_parmadil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/aranel_parmadil/pseuds/aranel_parmadil)




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